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Beta Bucks

One of the most vexing things a lot of Red Pill aware men encounter when they interact with women today is the expectation that women are coequally as rational agents as men. We were taught from the earliest ages by our blank-slate equalist teachers that boys and girls are all the same, having coequal potential for coequal successes in life (as they define them), then primarily focusing on the ‘correct’, female way of educating both sexes. This education isn’t limited to just the classroom; the Village uses many ways (media, pop culture, religion, etc.) to deliver what is fundamentally the same message – boys and girls, men and women, are essentially, effectively, the same with respect to their potentials. Now, that’s the message not the practice. Even when they are forced to recognize definitive differences they simply dismiss them by saying “We’re more alike than different” in the presumption that this should be enough to refocus and reinforce their blank-slate belief set.

So when men and women consider differences in gender, differences in double standards, inequalities in gender-specific issues and pretty much any empirical debate about these and other differences, men presume that the women they are ‘debating’ with are also looking for earnest, equitable answers beginning from the same coequal state of mutual interest. This is almost never the case.

The pretense that’s been embedded into men from the earliest years of their Blue Pill conditioning is since men and women are coequal agents they should both be interested in finding an objective truth together. But the frustration in this ‘debate’ comes from the simple fact that our differences are actually much more significant than the dismissals of equalists would want them to be. The roots of this deliberate misunderstanding are twofold: First, the innate solipsistic self-interest of women, and second, women’s predisposition to interpret information using the Emotional (versus Rational) interpretive processes.

When men and women debate intersexual issues of contention men opt for their innately preferred Rational interpretive process; we look for factual evidence to support a premise. Women opt for the Emotional process and then consider evidence. This difference in processing is where a lot of personal and ideological obstacles come into play between men and women. Our educational priorities of both men and women prioritizes the importance of emotion and its expression before a consideration of the Rational process. We teach boys/men to sublimate their natural proclivity towards reason by replacing it with the Emotional process. Thus, we’ve seen the push to encourage men to get in touch with their feelings or their feminine sides since the late 60s.

As I mentioned last week, women prioritize context (how a conversation makes them feel) in communication while men prioritize content (the information of the conversation); these differences are part of our biological/neurological evolved inheritances. This is where the misunderstanding starts between the sexes; however, calling this a ‘misunderstanding’ is a bit of a misnomer.

I’m sure a lot of readers think this is a longwinded way of saying women’s emotions blind them to the facts that men present to them when they debate. While this is true in a sense, this is shortsighted because, in the interests of simplifying things, most guys will just blow off the dynamics that build up this (often deliberate) miscommunication. Women don’t like the way a Rational-prioritized conversation makes them feel. Often the reality is unflattering to their solipsistically defined egos – but the communication feels wrong because women’s presumption is that men should just know to acknowledge their feelings in that debate (all communication really). On the female side the presumption is that men and women, being blank-slate equals, already know to prioritize the Emotional process, while on the male side men presume women will prioritize the Rational process because, again, we’re all the same, right?

This presuming that one sex sees the same way as the other is endemic in our time. I had a reader pose me with a similar example:

I had a conversation with my LTR at dinner tonight where I did a thought exercise with her. I asked her to imagine what it would be like if people visually saw different colors when they looked at various objects but had consistent names for those colors in their own minds. For example, person A sees what person B calls Blue, but it looks like what would be called green if person A could peer into person B’s mind. The point was we can’t know what colors actually look like from an individual subjective perspective. Although I tried several times to walk through this, she couldn’t comprehend what I was trying to explain. I then realized that this exercise involved imagining a first person conscious experience from multiple perspectives. This test could be a proxy test for (women’s) solipsism.

This thought experiment is a good way to illustrate solipsism in women, but it’s an even better example of the default presumptions men and women have of each other in other areas. As it stands today, in our feminine-primary social order, the Blue Pill conditions us to default to cognitive models that are defined by the female experience. Thus, whatever best satisfies a female-primary purpose is always considered the correct purpose. The way women think, the way women prioritize their Emotional interpretive process, is the right way for men to think – and the mutual presumption is that men already do (or should) think and process stimuli like women do. Anything else, anything that would recognize a difference in men from women, always feels wrong.

This default presumption of a female-correct way of interpreting and experiencing the world isn’t limited to our differences in communication. This misalignment of interpretive differences also extends to the false presumption that men and women approach the concept of love from a mutually understood perspective. Men love idealistically, women love opportunistically, yet men’s presumption is that both men and women approach love from the Disneyesque idealism they believe women are capable of. Men too believe that women see the same colors they do and have the same names for those colors. In this case those colors are the concepts and approaches women have towards love. I may write a new essay outlining this dynamic soon, but I’ve already written many prior posts on this experiential difference.

Rationalism vs. The Rational Process

As a result of pushing the Emotional process as the correct way of interpreting our world the Rational process necessarily gets demonized today. It feels wrong to a social order predicated on the Emotional process, so the truths that the Rational process reveals seem cruel, biased or vindictive when they refute the interpretations of the Emotional process. The importance of Emotion has been elevated above an interpretive process to where it’s now entered a metaphysical realm. This is where the Emotional process becomes Emotionalism. In the light of this, the Rational process is overshadowed and sublimated in importance. But the Rational process is what exposes emotionalism for what it is: Emotion is an evolved, biological interpretive process that serves our species well, but the feelings it generates are biological responses to environmental stimuli, not evidence of some higher consciousness or mythic existential importance that goes beyond anything in the physical realm.

The Rational process throws a cold bucket of truth on lofty emotionalism. As a result, and because emotionalism has been a basis of our social order for millennia now, the Rational process had to be debased in importance.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. – Proverbs 3:5

This scripture is an example of the conflict between emotionalism and the rationalism that popular social consciousness would like to apply to the Rational interpretive process. The Rational process is based in our collective and subjective intelligence. Healthy men and women both have the mental hardware to use the Rational process well, but where we differ is in our gendered mental firmware. When we collectively prefer one process to the other, this is where we decide which gender’s process will define our social order. In order for emotionalism to supersede rationality and ensure its preeminence appeals to the emotional above the rational have to be popularized.

If we could depend on an unbiased, unadulterated form of reason the Rational process would be a superior methodology. But as I stated before, rationalism is dependent on intelligence and that intelligence takes time. In some ways the Rational process is sensitive to both instinct and emotion, in other’s that reasoning is painfully, sometimes fatally slow. The world happens fast and vacillating in the reasoning process might easily kill an individual. Fortunately we have instinct and emotion to carry us through. The Rational process requires time because it requires learning, contemplation, theorizing and any number of high-order thinking processes to be effective. And even then, that effectiveness depends on reasoning’s accuracy. For the past three or four hundred years we’ve increasingly had the luxury to develop our Rational process, but for all the advancements it’s given us, when it comes to intersexual dynamics emotion is still the priority.

An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings.

We have placed such importance on emotion at the expense of reason that we’ll risk personal safety in our ‘right’ to express it. No doubt most men are familiar with repressing their emotional responses, but it’s interesting to consider that even with this self-control and even with our innate predilection to process emotion differently than women, men are the ones accused of failing to be ‘in touch with their emotions’. On first glance Robert Greene’s quote here appears to be wisdom (I think it is) – self-control, mastery of one’s emotional state, is a virtue. Yet, in our emotional-primary social order we’ll hear women complain that men are less emotionally available. And this conflict illustrates again that whatever is expedient to the female imperative is what is to be considered ‘correct’ at that moment.

Empiric reason is the foundation of what humanity has made of itself. Setting aside emotionality and considering challenges in a Rational interpretive process is fundamental to understanding the emotional and instinctive process and their advantages and weaknesses. For the record it’s my belief that all of these interpretive processes in union are are necessary elements in the human experience, but my focus on these processes is to lay a foundation for a better understanding of them. It’s easy to get caught up in the demonization of the instinctual and the rational when the emotional is defining what’s bad or good for our collective experiences.

When I wrote Appeals to Reason I was exploring the futility of expecting women to transition into a logical reasoning of why she should logically be with a guy who was more than happy to embody all of the aspects she stated she wants in a man. The manosphere idiom is “no woman was ever reasoned or logicked into bed with a guy”, women don’t follow the Rational process when it comes to interrelating with men. It’s all Instinctual and Emotional, and usually in that order. A man might be able to use his rational facilities to better understand women’s evolved instinctual and emotional responses, and what prompts them, but reason itself isn’t the key to that interrelation.

Appealing to women’s logic and relying on deductive reasoning to sort it out is the calling card of a Beta mind. There is nothing more anti-seductive for women than appealing to her reason. Arousal, attraction, sexual tension, subcommunication of desire, all happen indirectly and below the social surface for women. It’s not that women are incapable of reasoning (hypergamy is one logical bitch) or are crippled by their emotion-based hindbrains, it’s that if you’re asking her how to be more attractive you don’t Get It. It’s in the doing, not the asking.

If you’ve stuck with me to the end of this series I want to say thanks. I really felt that these interpretive processing models needed to be fully outlined as what I’ll get into in the coming months will need this as a basis for it.

The following was from a reader’s comment exchange I had back in March. I wanted to add this here before I move on to the Rational process, because it think it encapsulates a lot of the (often misguided) presumptions we have when it comes to the primary importance we apply to our Emotional process. As I mentioned last week, for millennia now we’ve elevated our Emotional process of interpreting our reality to mythical importance. So insaturated is this importance in our personal and cultural being that to even question it seems sacrilegious. We are literally born into a dependence on emotions for our own survival. That is part of our earliest development, but the conditioning that gives rise to the primacy of emotionalism is layered onto us for the rest of our lives. Emotionalism is the religion that we’ve fashioned from our Emotional interpretive process.

Women practice emotional manipulation and men practice emotional detachment. It’s been a game playing out for thousands of years. Somehow the roles got scrambled in the last century. Things will balance out one way or another in the coming future.

What’s been popularized in our social consciousness as ‘emotional detachment‘ is not a manipulation tactic of men. Men’s mental firmware processes emotion differently from women, but because we live in a feminine-primary social order we’re conditioned to believe that the way women process emotion is the “correct” way for men to process them as well. I made the point a little while ago in another essay that what we think is men’s incorrect way of communicating with other men is really men’s natural way of communicating. I’d linked to an article in the Boston Globe about the problem of “lonely middle aged men” and how they don’t do communication and friendship like women do. Men’s natural, general, indifference to their emotional state isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our mental firmware.

This isn’t to say men don’t get lonely or share the same emotional states as women, but it is to say that men do emotions differently than women. We are naturally predisposed to prioritize information above emotion; the Instinctual and Rational processes come before emotion in our interpretive process. I can remember early on in my marriage when I would talk to a buddy of mine on the phone and then abruptly just say “see ya” or hang up. He knew I’d call him back to relay whatever info we were discussing sooner or later, but my wife thought something was wrong. “Is everything OK with Ray?” she’d ask, and I said “Yeah, why wouldn’t it?” She explained that she thought my ending the call like that was rude or that we’d had an argument. She was used to long drawn conversations with girlfriends or her sister and then ending them by some confessions of how much they would miss each other or some other meaningful way.

She thought my way of communicating was wrong, but this is how men interact with each other – say what you mean, mean what you say and get to the point. This was also the presupposition of the Boston Globe article and many other posts; men do communication wrong, men do emotion wrong, and therefore they must be conditioned to do them correctly. That is to say, like women do.

Men lack the hardware and the firmware to do this, but they are conditioned to reflexively respond as women do from the earliest age. Thus, when a man processes emotion naturally it appears he’s not “feeling” correctly or isn’t “emotionally available” to female-correct sensibilities. In this context a man doing emotion as his innate predispositions compel him to seems like he’s deliberately playing out some ’emotional detachment’ game. But rather than accept that men and women are different and deal with emotions in different ways our egalitarian Blue Pill conditioning makes us presume the man is being inauthentic.

“He’s not really that way, it’s an act, or he’s just withholding his emotions to hurt a woman.” This is the rationale that female-correct society has to resort to because accepting that men evolved to process emotions differently would also mean that men and women are not the functional “equals” that blank-slate equalism is founded on. Thus, their emphasis is to pathologize this emotional detachment and make it one more negative aspect of maleness in need of a ‘cure’.

I think your comments are pertinent and you brought good rational arguments. However they are along the lines of “that’s how we are, men and women”, that’s how we evolved and we can’t do anything about it because it’s in our DNA and our mental programming. Feminism is marching on the fact that we’re born equal, even if there are obvious biological differences. Yes, women emote more and have the means to be greater emotional manipulators. But men can learn the so called feminine behaviors (The so called Game actually involves this and I noticed some of the PUAs mentioning that it’s the bisexual men who are actually the greatest players) and women can also learn the so called manly behaviors (there are a lot of examples especially in our current society). Is it good, is it bad? Hard to say. The thing is that the family is an artificial construction that helped our civilization flourish and it’s been lately systematically destroyed due to what you’re calling feminine primary social order.

Evolution is a continuous process and my opinion is that it’s either people will somehow transcend their biology (see AI or some kind of other conscious evolution) or after some “dark” times of men being more like women and women more like men the things will come to the previous “normality” of feminine women and manly men.

Human beings will not transcend their own evolution, they will adapt with their environments, but they will not be removed from its influences. We’ve been force fitting and conditioning men to be women for the past five generation. We presume that the feminine is the correct, unitary way that humans should be. We call that egalitarian equality, but what it comes down to is adopting a universal correct mode of being and it’s founded on feminine/female control of what is right and wrong – at least for the time being.

However, this force-fits boys and men into an unnatural state they never evolved for and all because the feminine is the presumed correct gender norm that we base equality on. We’re all expected to be equally female. What has that got us in those past five generations? A male suicide rate five times that of women. Boys prescribed sedatives for acting like boys instead of ‘correct’ girls. I can go on.

The fact remains that you and many others of your mindset believe that evolving or being in control of that process only progresses if boys and men “transcend” their biology and think like correct females. It is the height of new agey metaphysical woo woo hubris to expect one sex to behave counter to its 100,000 years of evolved nature and become like the other to accommodate what it thinks should be correct. This is the crux here; the feminine-primary social order we live in today is predicated on the infallibility of the female experience, however, this experience is only validated if both men and women are prioritizing women’s Emotional process as a way of interpreting the world.

Of the three cognitive, interpretive processes it is the Emotional process that people are most familiar with, and yet it’s also the most glorified when it comes to determining reality and truth. I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers with this essay – people invest a lot of themselves in their emotions. The reason for this is because for a very long time we’ve been taught to deify (sometimes literally) the importance of emotion to the human experience. We want to impart our emotions with a metaphysical quality to the point that understanding those feelings is something we expect our omniscient Gods to have a relation with. This is the mythic apex of the grandeur with which we regard emotion, but on a visceral level, the opposite end of that understanding, emotion is something very understandable and very ‘knowable’.

We interpret stimuli via the Emotional process, but we also express our emotional state through art and personal means. And this is the dual nature of emotion; it’s interpretive, but those interpretations are subjective to an individual. As such, these interpretations and expressions become part of our personality and identity. I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in many prior essays. A person can invest themselves so much (ego) into personal beliefs that they become a component part of who they are. Thus, an attack on the belief is literally an attack on the ego, but’s important to point out that those investments are integrally linked to the Emotional process. Emotion is not just an important filter through which we interpret the world, but its effects often shape us as individuals. So because of this subjective, ego-investment dynamic it’s hard not to step on a few toes or challenge the emotionally-inspired belief sets by considering emotion in an objective way.

As with most other aspects of Red Pill awareness. parsing out the nuts and bolts of how and why emotions work, how they evolved and the important survival functions they serve often has a way of dispelling the magic we apply to emotions. From a biological perspective we can prompt certain emotions (or buffer them) by creating the stimuli that evokes them. We can chemically induce an emotional response. We can alter moods with drugs and we can chemically compare the endorphins released into our bloodstream when we experience the ’emotional’ effects of love, lust and infatuation. There are many studies comparing love to addiction, and the effects of a breakup being comparable to ‘withdrawal’ symptoms.

Emotion has prompted virtually all of mankind’s greatest art, music, literature and so many more cultural effects it’s hard to think that emotion doesn’t define us as a species. Emotion has started wars, prompted self-sacrifice, moves us to mercy, ensures that our children are nurtured and sees that we care and cooperate with each other. Emotion is a blessing and a curse as environment and circumstance demand, but for all of that the Emotional process is a result of our evolved biology. Emotion is firmly rooted in our evolved capacity to experience and interpret our environment and circumstances. Emotion is rooted in the physical. And while it inspires us to acts that may seem divine or diabolic the fact remains that emotion is very much dependent on our evolved capacity to physically experience it.

I begin this essay stressing this point because the concept (not the process) of emotion has been elevated to such a mythic degree of importance in our present times that it supersedes almost all other considerations in life. We’re largely taught and conditioned to prioritize the importance of our emotional states above both the Instinctual and Rational processes, so to reduce emotion to a physical dynamic runs counter to what we feel it should mean to us. Unless we’re dealing with a clinical, physical depression we rarely consider that emotion is an interpretive process. We want to apply meaning to emotion rather than see it as the evolved tool it is to human beings.

Both Instinct and Reason influence and modify the Emotional process, and like both, Emotion is interpretive and functional. If we look at base emotions we can make inferences as to what their latent purposes might be. In the first post of this series I drew the lines between the effect of oxytocin inspiring feelings of trust and caring, and how the environmental prompts that trigger this hormone have a practical ‘real world’ function. We can speculate that the instinctual prompts that trigger the oxytocin then lead to the emotional processing of the feeling of trust/caring which then prompts physical behavior (nurturing a child, etc.) Hunger is another good example. Our physical state of hunger prompts feelings of anger or discontent which then compels us to action. In our evolutionary past this anger prompt would’ve been beneficial in that it motivated us to seek/kill food.

Those are just a couple of the many different basic prompts for the Emotional process, but emotion is much more complex and nuanced than this. The Emotional process is multi-layered, so when you combine various emotional interpretive processes with emotional responses you get various new iterations of emotion which then builds into more complex emotions. While instinct is the fastest of these processes, emotion can be more time intensive. Base emotions are relatively quick interpretations (though slower than instinct), but the more complex, compound emotions take time to interpret, build and then reinterpret. Because of this compositing process humans have a tendency to fixate on the emotion itself as being of primary importance; often forgetting or dismissing entirely the stimuli that originally prompted it. Furthermore, we forget or dismiss the latent purpose of that initial emotional interpretation that caused that composite cascade of emotions.

An understanding of this emotion compositing is necessary to understand why we tend to imbue emotions with such importance and power. While base emotions are linked to the ‘fast-twitch’ Instinctual process, the more complex emotions – the ones we subconsciously craft over more time – tend to be the ones we build belief sets around. This is very important to Red Pill awareness because it explains the motivations for, and foundations of, feminine-primary belief sets of both men and women, as well as the feminine-primary social order that is a result of those belief sets.

Gender Differences

Despite all the protestations of egalitarian minds, men and women are fundamentally different. Biologically, neurologically, endocrinologically and psychologically our gender-specific differences are significant. This isn’t a revelation to my Red Pill aware readers, but it’s a radical statement for the past generations who are emotionally invested in the idea of a blank-slate parity between the sexes they’ve been conditioned to believe is true. As I mention above, an ego-investment is component part of the personality of the individual so invested. To attack the investment, the belief, the ideology, the educated-but-misinformed opinion, is to attack the person. That belief set, like the emotions that compounded to develop it, is subjective to the individual experiencing the emotions that led to it.

One presupposition that has been a part of the manosphere for as long as I’ve been a part of it is that women put “feels before realz”. In several essays I’ve made a case for women’s innate communication style being context based – women focus on how the communication makes them feel; the information conveyed is secondary. For men this is reversed; men prioritize the content (the information) of the communication and the context is secondary. I’ve written a lot about how each sex evolved into their communication priorities, but down to the biological level, per our sex, the answers can be found in how our brains differ.

There are many multivariate studies that reveal similar findings and brain imaging, and the uncanny complementarity between men and women’s brains. For the most part studies indicate that women tend to prioritize the Emotional interpretive process above the Rational interpretive process and vice versa for men. That is not to say women are entirely incapable of reason, nor does it imply that men are emotionally stunted. What I’m suggesting is that our innate, biological predispositions prioritize our interpretive processes to emotion in women and rationality in men. Women can be taught to prioritize reason over emotion and, as I’ll illustrate next, men most definitely can be taught conditioned to prioritize emotion above their innate reason.

There are also numerous studies on how these interpretive prioritization function as a result of neurological gendered differences in men and women. Women process negative emotions differently than men. Men largely lack the brain architecture (wiring) to process emotion in the same manner and with the same degree of prioritization as women do. This is simply how we’re built, but before any woman pops off about their ‘superior’ emotional capacity, bear in mind, women’s brains are not wired for the rational and spatial tasks men’s brains are more suited to. Out of the womb, a boy is predisposed to throw an object with greater force and more accuracy than a girl. And that’s just one easy illustration of the mental firmware men are born with.

None of this, however, is about one sex being superior to the other’s innate predispositions. It’s not a contest, it’s just about which disposition is better suited to a task. But still, the first inclination today is to presume women’s greater emotional capacity should be the normative in our present-day feminine-primary social order. For the past 60+ years we’ve lived in a social condition that has made every attempt to feminize men; to get them more in touch with their emotions – to condition men, despite their brain wiring, to prioritize the Emotional process above both instinct and reason.

To reiterate, women are not necessarily handicapped because the Rational process isn’t their innate, predisposed preference, but neither are men handicapped for lacking the interpretive hardware to prioritize the Emotional process as women do. That said, for the past 4-5 generations we’ve lived in a social order that has presumed a blank-slate equalist perspective of men and women. We live in a time when men not emoting like women is a disorder to be treated and conditioned. We presume today that boys are defective girls because they don’t prioritize the Emotional in their communications or their interpretive process. Today the Emotional process that women innately prefer is the ‘correct’ way for all, egalitarian, blank-slate equals to prioritize their interpretations of the world and each other with.

As most of my readers already know, I see the presumption of equalism as being little more than a cover story for feminine primacy. For several generations now, and especially since the Sexual Revolution, the pretense of gender equality has been the vehicle for female social primacy. At first it was subtle and inoffensive, but today this social engineering effort is out in the open. And with more and more empirical evidence mounting that proves the sexes are far less “equal” in nature than prior egalitarian doctrines would allow anyone to accept, we see an intensifying effort to retain the social narrative on the part of equalist. Only now it’s focused on the innate ‘wrongness’ of masculinity by demonizing and pathologizing anything conventionally masculine. This new intensive effort is only able to find legitimacy because prior feminized generations base their belief sets on the the inherent ‘correctness’ of prioritizong the Emotional process – a process that is fundamentally, biologically linked to women’s preferences in interpreting the world around them.

So today we look at men as if they’re stunted and ‘wrong’ for communicating with other men in a way that prioritizes information before how it makes them feel. We still today implore men to get in touch with their feminine sides – the last vestige of Car Jung’s bastardized and now disproven animus theories – but pity men for lacking the hardware to emote ‘correctly’ like women. We don’t teach boys emotional control because in our emotional-prioritizing social order anything that looks like control seems like masculine oppression of emotional expression. Instead we create new, more intense, ways of discouraging men of ever embracing or “getting in touch” with their masculine sides. We discard masculine discipline for emotional pretense. We teach boys at younger and younger ages to fear and despise their innate masculine selves. We create programs to cure masculinity as if it were a health crisis. This effort will only intensify as gender differences become more and more unignorable and the social engineering of the last 60 years becomes more obvious.

As a basis of that cure is the fundamental presumption that interpreting our world through the filter of Emotion should supersede or entirely disqualify the Rational interpretive process. As you might guess, men’s innate predisposition is to interpret our world through Reason. Today we live in a world where feelings trump both instinct and reason. This is why the current generation makes the Emotional process and their feelings more important than any other consideration – they are the cumulative result of having prioritized women’s emotional preferences above all else, while simultaneously engineering consecutive generations of feminized men to facilitate it for the last seven decades.

In the next and final installment in this series I’ll be addressing the Rational interpretive process and how we might imagine better future generations based on seizing and instituting a social order founded on masculine reason.

I want to thank you if you’ve made it through the first part of this series and you stuck with it. In some respects I can see why it might be odd that I’m covering cognitive processes, however, these are really the foundational premises for so many other Red Pill intersexual dynamics, as well as interpersonal and even social dynamics between humans that they deserve some sort of fleshing out. Again, I want to stress that these cognitive processing models are ideas I’m coming to and not settled science. However, they are based on both classic interpretations combined with the benefit of what we know about the biological, evolutionary and anthropological aspects of the cognitive processes today.

If you made the connection to Freud’s components of personality models – the Id, Ego and Super Ego – in the last post you at least grasp something of the initial theory I’m building on here. Useful as they are, Freud’s models lacked anything like an understanding of how the human mind works or how it evolved to the degree we take for granted today. Freud made his best guess at these processes from an inner psyche perspective. He formed his theories from what he deduced was operating inside our heads. My belief is that his (and others’) cognitive process models evolved and developed in response to interpreting our environment and the stimuli that our senses translated to them in our formative evolutionary past. Really, all of these interpretive processes, Instinct, Emotion and Reason, are the result of our experiential lives and the many benefits they provided us in surviving and reproducing.

All of that is not to discount the internal psyche and how these processes define who we are. Freud’s model proposed the Id, Ego and Superego are components of personality, what I’m proposing is that these components are the result of evolved cognitive processes – Instinct, Emotion and Reason – that served to create these inner models which later became those components of personality. I should say that I’m not entirely sold on these Freudian components, but I can see how cognitive processes would’ve led to developing them. I propose that these components of personality, Freud’s or other’s, are the products of these interpretive processes.

The Ego is a result of the Rational (Reason) process, while the Superego is a summation of the Emotional process. Since I don’t want to veer off into the psychology lesson in all this I’ll leave this proposition for another essay, but I do want to make a distinction here; What I’m proposing in this series is that our evolved interpretive processes are the means by which we interpret our reality, which in turn shapes who we are individually, socially and sexually.

Base Instincts

Stripped down, the Id is a result of the Instinctual process and largely resides in our unconscious or preconscious experience. Instinct is reflexive, and the behaviors it prompts are directly related to our basic survival and reproductive needs. Instinct operates outside our consciousness because of the inability of the human brain to focus on the endless sources of stimulus we experience in life. As good as we’d like to think we are with multi-tasking our interpretive cognition can only process so much; the rest is pushed into our subconscious periphery and hindbrain subroutines. This is the auto-pilot part of our instinctual cognition.

Since we largely see our Rational and Emotional processes (not to mention our social consciousness) as “higher order” processes, we tend to downplay the importance of Instinct. Our Instinctive process evolved to sustain our physical survival and reproductive imperatives in as pragmatic and practical a way as would be expedient. In most respects Instinctual interpretation and cognition is, by necessity, based on immediacy. By comparison, Emotion and Reason are slower forms of cognition, and, in the case of Reason, requires a period of learning, development and internalization. As such, there is no complication of conscience or morality, nor time for rational or emotional reflection when instinctual awareness and action is necessary. All the things we call sin or immoral, unethical or duplicitous, are manifested by our Instinctual process. But so too are ennobling aspects like self-sacrifice, violence-in-protection, mate guarding and parental investment. Hypergamy is also a behavioral and psychological dynamic that is deeply rooted in the Instinctual process.

Because of all that instinct often carries a negative preconception, at least by modern standards. And thus the Id becomes the part of the human psyche inseparably connected to the instinctual process. The desire for immediate gratification, the direct, unmitigated satisfaction of our most basic needs, and the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure; all of these we associate with the Id. However, all of these basic gratifications are directed towards elements of our evolved, instinctual needs for survival and insurances of thriving in the future. Much of what we think of as impulsivity is connected to the immediate aspect of instinct, but even this often serves some latent biological or survival purpose.

Gendered Differences

In psychology 101 we’re taught to think of the Id as our ‘childish’ selves. How many times have we read in the manosphere about how men can better relate with women via Amused Masteryor relating to them like a bratty younger sister? This process, this PUA technique, is a subconscious appeal to women’s Id via the Instinctual process. When I proposed that women want a man who Just Gets It a huge part of that dynamic relies on a man appealing to a woman’s Instinctual cognition. This is exactly why demonstrating an intent serves so much better than explicating an intent. Actions speak louder than words because actions always speak clearly to our Instinctual processing. Yet one more reason I, and most of my Red Pill contemporaries, advocate for the Medium being the Message – behavior almost always appeals to instinct.

One of the questions I’m always asked by guys is, how do I know when a woman is in whichever phase of her ovulation? Usually this is prompted by some reasoned want to be able to know when to turn up the Alpha around their girlfriend’s proliferative phase and ease off when she’s in her luteal (down cycle) phase. When you look at this in terms of cognitive processes, a man’s Reasoning process wants to deductively solve a problem that is rooted in the Instinctual process. It certainly makes sense, like a lot of other problems, to use our smarts to solve that reproductive problem. The real problem is that the use of Reason is what defeats the Instinctual cognition. There are actually many subconscious, instinctual mechanisms men have evolved to determine a great deal of information about women reproductive states, but our Reason and what goes into influencing it, tends to make us discount what out Instinctive process is telling us.

Most guys get frustrated with Game at some stage of their learning (Reason) it. The most common complaint is “I can never hope to remember all of this shit perfectly all the time. I can’t calibrate the way I need to, or, this is all an act, when can I let my hair down and just relax with a girl?” Another common question/presumption guys hit me with is how I manage to continually Game my wife. The answer I almost universally give is that I don’t, in fact, consciously Game my wife. Rather, my success in our marriage and really all of my relationships with all the women in my life is the result of having internalized what I’ve learned from Red Pill awareness and made it who I am. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and internalized it to the point that Game became my instinctual response to women’s instinctual process.

Game is not an act for me, it’s an instinct. If you were to put a guitar in my hands today I could play it with a good degree of proficiency. I can play by ear and instinctually I anticipate where notes and chord progressions go if I’m trying to play a song I’ve never played before because I’ve been playing guitar for the better part of my life. However, there was a point in time where all of that was foreign to me. I could play by rote memorization, but playing music wasn’t instinctual. Playing an instrument wasn’t part of who I was at that point in time.

The same is true for internalizing Game. It is entirely possible for your Rational process to inform your Instinctual process as well as your Emotional processes. This interplay can work for all our cognitive processes, but as I’m focusing on instinct today I want to stress again that Rational and Emotional processes can alter the, largely subconscious, Instinctual process. I have pretty good pitch as a result of being a musician for so long. If you asked me to play a particular note or chord I would instinctively do so. What I wouldn’t do is hunt around the fretboard counting frets and string to come to it. This is the best illustration I can give you with regards to internalizing other things.

Martial arts is another good example. There are certain innate, instinctual reactions we have when we’re confronted with conflict or protecting ourselves. When something flies at our faces we flinch. When we hear a sudden loud noise we startle. These are inborn parts of our firmware that evolved in us for very good reasons. What martial arts training does is forces us to sublimate those natural instincts and replace them with more efficient instinctual responses. Again, this is the Rational process rewriting the instinctual process via internalization.

Art has always been something I’ve had an innate ability for. I have do doubt that many of our natural cognitive ‘gifts’ are in some way gene expressions. So when we see a ‘natural’ at something our rational/emotional minds tend to think of it as something almost supernatural. However, I had to learn to play music because I was determined to express myself creatively in that fashion as well, and that took perseverance and internalization of skills. I think the same can be said for guys we think are ‘naturals’ with regard to Game and women. They may have an instinctual affinity for Game. They may be blessed with good genetics. But Game can be learned and internalized down to the Instinctual level.

All of that said, there are still fundamental parts of our mental firmware that are ‘pre-loaded’ into us at birth. Shit tests, Hypergamy, mate guarding behaviors, ovulatory shift behaviors, and many more are in-loaded in women and every bit as Instinctual as breathing or eating or self-preservation. Just as there are physical gender differences in our brains and bodies, so too are their differences in men and women’s Instinctual processes. The easiest one for us to consider is in sexual imperatives. I’ve noted in many essays that only women are Hypergamous. Men and women’s sexual strategies are reflective of their differing physical and mental make up, but those strategies are also different (and often contradicting) as a result of the Instinctual process unique to men and women as well.

One of the more powerful instincts men have is our sexual impulse and as a consequence it’s one that we are taught to control the most. Hypergamy is also a product of women’s Instinctual process, however, since about 60 years ago, prosocial control over Hypergamy has become something individual to a woman. Men’s self-control over their sexual nature is something that’s been part of our upbringing for millennia, women today are just now being expected to self-police their own sexual impulsivity.

These innate gender differences in instinct are a very difficult aspect of human nature for both egalitarian equalists and traditional moralists to accept. Equalists chomp at the bit with respect to their ego-investments in blank-slate idealism. Even the idea of a gendered difference in human nature, much less a human “nature” at all (a concept most deny) conflicts with the social constructivism that forms most of their ideology. Moralists tend to think that acknowledging (much less embracing) our instinctual selves is endorsing the worst of it, or it’s some kind of license to shirk the personal responsibilities for it. And, for both equalist and moralist, accepting our instinctual natures seems deterministic in a way that conflicts with their sense of existential control.

Well, the good news for both is that understanding men and women’s Instinctually processed natures is something our other two processes (for better or worse) have an influence over. There’s a common refrain from equalists today that presumes we’ve “evolved beyond” our base instincts (if they acknowledge them at all). From moralists we’ve always been ‘higher minded’ and above our instincts, that is if we accept some ideological ‘truth’. The root of both of these presumptions can be traced to the Emotional and Rational processes influencing our Instinctive process.

I’m of the opinion that very few of us are actually ruled by our instincts, but they are always the favorite scapegoat for ideologues. As a Red Pill aware man I think it’s important to have an objective understanding of how the Instinctive process operates in ourselves and women. Denying or disqualifying the importance of instinct and why it evolved is usually one of the biggest blindspots for a Blue Pill conditioned mind.

In the next part of this series I’ll explore the Emotional process and how it’s become the preeminent social-defining experience for us.

So, I was arguing with myself as to whether I ought to post something here on my 50th birthday, which is today. I read through a few other notable guys in the manosphere and they all have something like 30 Lessons at 30 and 40 Rules for 40 or something like that. Not to take anything away from them, but for the most part lists like this are basic aphorisms that are certainly wisdom, but are things you can probably be 20 and think “Hmmm, yeah, okay,…”

That said I had considered just enjoying my short break from the blog (two weeks is as long as I’ve gone in six and a half years) and relaxing today, but I’m fifty today and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been doing some life assessment for the past 4 months or so. 50 lessons at 50 might get a little tedious to read so I’ll just let my readers in on what I’ve been considering lately and what I think have been a few or the more important lessons I’ve learned in the last 50 years. I’m not exactly a stream of consciousness style writer, but I’m going to be a little more loose and open with this. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to meat & potatoes posts next week.

In the six and a half years I’ve been blogging, and the 7 more I’ve been writing in the ‘sphere, I’ve done my best not to inject my personal life into what I write about unless it’s directly related to a topic and serves as a decent illustration for some purpose. There’s a few I can think of, but like I said, they’re usually to highlight a point. Hell, for the first five years of this blog and all of my time writing at SoSuave I did my best to stay anonymous and kept my nondescript face out of the public sphere. And it’s anonymity where I’m going to start.

When I began writing on the SoSuave forums I had already learned the hard way how easy it is to have your livelihood taken away from you by vindictive and juvenile minds who simply want to have some power beyond the cubicles they live in. I was working for a liquor importer and I’d put together a fantastic co-branding arrangement with an X-sports organization and one of our proprietary brands. I’d worked on the promo work and all the creative for almost two years and all of it got flushed down the toilet by one email alleging that one guy from the organization had used a racial slur (during a charity event no less). The allegations were false, I went to great lengths to prove it false, but the damage was done. The C.O.O. who was entirely unfamiliar with the organization, the social circle or the event pulled the plug.

Two years work building the association was gone in the space of 2 hours and one anonymous email because it was simpler to pull the plug than it was to have to explain why it was all the vindictiveness of some kid on the internet who had a beef with some guy who rode a motorcycle. That taught me a lesson that I’ve used a lot in my writing – stay anonymous as possible, because all the years of hard work I’ve invested into this blog, my books, the audio books, my talks now and my public persona can be lost in the course of a day. I’m far more anti-fragile these days. My work is on my terms, which also took a very long time to establish to my liking, but even still I understand how truly fragile my own and so many other men’s lives really are with respect to maintaining it.

I don’t really like that term, “anti-fragile” is like a badge of honor self-made guys like to attach to that other term “entrepreneur”. Not to take anything away from them, but everyone is fragile to some degree. If the social justice zeitgeist of this era can’t destroy you financially, they’ll happily destroy your marriage, your family, the things you love to do and the company you keep. We live in an era when the politics of personal destruction are easily enacted with a few emails and a viral tweet.

So I did my best to stay anonymous as Rollo Tomassi. Even when I became more anti-fragile I understood that if some hater couldn’t get me fired they would come after my daughter, my wife, my dogs, my extended family, etc. without any fore or afterthought. That’s kind of changing for me now. I’ve got three books under my belt (yes, there’s a fourth I’m working on too) and after doing really only two in-person talks it became clear that I needed to be more accessible.

The Rational Male, Preventive Medicine and Positive Masculinity are my dents in the universe. At 50 now I can see that these books and my writing, my ideas and the dots I’ve connected, courtesy of the men who’ve offered there experiences to the whole, will be my legacy in this life. That legacy is dependent on Amazon publishing and printing my work, WordPress hosting my blog, Audible accepting my audio books and Twitter and YouTube providing their platforms from which I can spread those ideas. Everyone is fragile. My plans for the future and ensuring these ideas live involves making them less dependent on this fragility.

I make the least amount of royalties on my printed books, but they are what I hope men will buy the most because it’s the least fragile way of spreading and discussing the ‘dangerous thought’ that is the Red Pill in intersexual dynamics. It’s a very strange and humbling thought to think that my grand and great-grandchildren might read my words in the future. It’s also really humbling to know that I’ve helped other men change and improve their lives; sometimes saved their lives. I have trouble describing what it feels like to have a guy you just met pour his heart out to you like he’s known you for years and tells you if it wasn’t for what you wrote, if it hadn’t been for me reaching him with these ideas he’d be dead. It kind of give you that weird chill you get when you see someone else get hurt and you can’t do anything to help.

But I did help. I can actually say that my work has positively impacted the lives of other men (and women) and likely the course of their lives and their families’ lives, and the whole causality thing kind of unravels from there. It’s what I’d always hoped I could do. As most readers know, a lot of what prompted my writing was the suicide of my brother-in-law and another good friend back in 2003. I’d been writing in what would become the ‘sphere since 2001, but these deaths were what moved me to try to help other men more directly.

I’ve done really well for myself. That’s a statement of fact, though it sounds like I’m glossing myself. I still see a lot of guys I used to know who, back in the day, I was almost certain we’re going to go places and do big things. With the exception of maybe two, every one of them has fallen short of what I used to think they’d accomplish. A lot of them were the inspirations for posts about changing the direction of your life to better facilitate a woman’s plans for her own life. People hate it when other people compare lives. The standard line is “well if they’re happy who are you to judge?” or else it’s “we all find happiness in our own ways” or something suitably ambiguous. It’s one of those things we say so as not to appear judgmental. But everyone of us makes comparisons about a great many thing. There’s not a woman on planet earth who doesn’t compare herself, her quality of life and the man she’s married with her sister’s.

I could give a shit about what these guys have done with their lives up to age fifty, but I do think we need to take assessments of how our lives have turned out. It’s natural for us to want to measure our achievements, but at my age all that does now is make me realize how stupid I was when I thought so much more of other people and not enough of myself then. We shouldn’t compare ourselves with anyone else, I got that, but we should compare ourselves with what we believe is our personal potential. I’ve still got a lot to do before they put me in the ground, but I think I’ve done okay up to now with respect to my potential. If anything I don’t think I gave my potential enough credit when I was younger. Maybe we all do that?

I’m kind of scared of the future in a way. My Dad died from Alzheimers/Dementia just shy of his 73rd birthday in 2010. He had early onset too, so he started forgetting things at about 64. At least thats when it became apparent to everyone. That’s my worst fear today, but it’s also whats driving me now. In the autobiography of Steve Jobs it was obvious to everyone that once he acknowledged he was going to die early he started pushing the limits of what he wanted to get done before he went out. Consequently we got all of these great innovations in a relatively short time. Look at Apple’s “innovations” today. *I’ve only ever used Macs, even when they weren’t cool.

I’ve done far better for myself than my father ever did. Again, that’s not a ‘slay-the-father’ sentiment it’s just fact. My dad didn’t have the same potential though. And I still have more potential to fulfill. This has become more pressing for me recently and not just because of the fear of dying early – and yes, I do fear death, but mostly because I see it as a cessation of potential to do more. I genuinely have a mental list of things I need to do that I’ve only really become aware of since I started this blog and became an author and matured into the 40-50 year old Rollo Tomassi. Don’t think of that as a bucket list of some experiences to be had before death, rather, think of it as a ‘to do’ list that I need to accomplish before I go out. And that ‘to do’ list only became apparent to me in the last 7 years.

I know what I need to do now. It kind of sucks that a purpose to life might be something you only realize later in life. I’m sure it happens sooner for some guys, but for me it was necessary to live through the experiences that made me before I could know it. I’m still an artist in my essence, and I get edgy if I’m unable to create something new every day. Seriously, I’ve been like this since I was a child. I have a need to create, even if it’s just something simple, every day. That need has carried over into every aspect of my life and career. And really, the books are products of that need, but there’s a lot more, a purpose to the works themselves and that’s what my life has been about since I began the blog and the books and my persona.

I am Rollo Tomassi now. Don’t worry, I’m not legally changing my name. At first it was a clever online handle for me, and my real name is so white-bread generic it almost serves as a form of anonymity. Now it is me, and I’m okay with that.

Having said all of that, I’m considering a kind of semi-retirement from my primary career in the liquor and gaming promo business and applying myself more to writing and speaking. I’m already kind of doing this now since reaching a state of being financially anti-fragile. I’ll never fully retire from my brands so long as I have ownership percentages and creative decisions will need to be made. I’m not sure how this is going to look, but I find myself wanting to apply more of myself to writing, speaking, maybe doing some kind of podcast or terrestrial radio show. I feel like I need to do this now with my 50s ahead of me and more potential to do good in the world with what I have and the time I hope I have left.

In the comments today I was hoping to see what my peers thought of all this. I hope it’s not to navel gazy.

This is one of my best known quotes because it resonates with so many men. There was a time in the early 2000s when I was doing peer counseling for men – most of whom were at least a decade my senior – as part of my undergraduate study and one consistent theme I got from almost all of them was how their marriages (or LTRs) had been so much more sexually satisfying when they were dating their wives or before they’d committed to some kind of exclusivity. That’s always the crux of it for guys. They mistakenly believed that the hot monkey sex they were having with their women prior to “doing the right thing” and getting married or committed was something that would be characteristic of their quality woman into a long term relationship with them.

Why was this the case for guys? I can remember coming up with this quote as part of the advice I was giving while working for one of these men. He, like many of the other guys, had gotten to the point that he would do almost anything to get back to that real desire that convinced him to commit to his wife in the first place. And, like many of these guys, he’d convinced his wife to go to marriage counseling in order to find out what exactly it was that he needed to do to “get her to come around” to wanting to bang him. Nothing was working for him. Even after his sessions he was still either sexless or his wife only begrudgingly would have lackluster ‘starfish’ sex with him. We called that a ‘grudge fuck’ back then.

As a student of behavioral psychology my interest was (still is) in what motivates or incentivizes behavior in people (sometimes animals). What was it that inspires genuine desire as opposed to behavior that still has a purpose, but was more motivated by future outcome. You can make a case that genuine desire is also motivated by a perceived outcome, but in this instance I’m making a distinction between a natural, unsolicited desire as opposed to an incentive based on a preconceived outcome – if all goes according to plan.

This guy broke down in tears with me on at least two occasions. He just couldn’t understand why what was supposed to work (open communication, rational discourse and honest negotiation) wasn’t getting her to “come around” to having sex with him. It was then I thought, you cannot negotiate genuine desire. Either a woman wants to fuck you or she doesn’t. There are definitely ways to prompt that genuine desire – most of which are behavioral and conditional – but as has been stated many times in the ‘sphere, attraction is not a choice. The key word there is choice. Few men would ‘choose’ to be attracted by an obese woman and in many ways this choice dynamic is why women promoting the ‘body acceptance’ narrative have a tough time of it. For all the nonsense about beauty being a social construct, arousal for men is very much rooted in evolved biology. Men can’t choose to get an erection for a woman they’re simply not aroused by.

The same holds true for women, but the conditions are different. Women can and do have sex for reasons other than genuine desire. Negotiated desire really isn’t desire at all, but women have readily used sexual access to achieve those perceived outcomes I mentioned above here. Negotiated desire only ever leads to obligated compliance. A talented hooker or stripper may be very convincing in her act that she’s really into having sex with a man, but the negotiation that takes place before the act can never make a woman want to have sex with her client. Attraction is not a choice, but really, arousal is not a choice either.

Hormonal

I am presently about half way through my read of Dr. Martie Haselton’s new book Hormonal. I was really anticipating this book’s release, and I had intended to do my first-ever book review of it here, but as I read through I’ve decided not to. I still highly recommend reading it. As you might guess it’s chock full of stats and research confirmation of so much of what I write here that I want to put it at the top of the required Rational Male reading list. I’ve been referencing Dr. Haselton’s (and her colleagues) work since I began this blog, but the delivery of the information was disappointing, and in a lot of instances, very immature and sophomoric. It’s written almost as an apologetic to feminists for having to kill a lot of sacred feminist social convention cows. I feel as if she’s writing ‘down’ to the women who she’ll inevitably market this book to, but, if you can get past her constant attempts to legitimize her feminist credentials, the information is absolute gold.

One aspect of female sexual dynamics that Haselton and her team detail quite a bit is the idea of an Estrus state in human females. I’m not sure how well appreciated this research is in the manosphere, which is one reason I included it in Positive Masculinity, but this concept is really integral to how we define Hypergamy. As most of my readers know, Hypergamy – women’s dualistic sexual strategy (and really life strategy) – is much more than a tendency of a woman to ‘marry up’. In Hormonal the ideas of Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks really solidify with the research.

However, as useful as it is as a catchy euphemism Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks could better be described as Alpha Seed and Beta Need. In a woman’s peak ovulatory phase of her menstrual cycle she enters an estrus state and becomes subject to behaviors that can only be defined as a pretext of seeking Alpha seed. In other words, nature and Hypergamy are very practical in maximizing the chances that a woman may get pregnant with the best available genetic specimen. Granted, the true outcome of all of that is subject to environment and a woman’s personal conditions, but the practicality of it remains the same as it has for 100,000 years. It’s also important to keep in mind that a woman’s behaviors, strategies, rationales and her own interpretation of all of them in those various times and conditions are also a part of the overall latent purpose of a woman consolidating on the best Alpha Seed and Beta to supply her needs.

While women are subject to an estrus state they still require the second half of Hypergamy – the Beta need for security, provisioning, protection, comfort and at least the sharing of parental investment responsibilities for any offspring. Estrus in women is concealed, meaning it is (or used to be) nearly, but not totally undetectable in women. There are in fact various ways men evolved to intuitively determine whether a woman is in an estrus state of fertility; most of these today are socially shamed in men so as to further confuse them and advantage women, but that’s a topic for another essay. A concealed estrus aids women in optimizing both Alpha Seed and Beta Need and it’s likely that much of what accounts for women’s sexual strategy is the result of this concealment.

Now, a lot has been written by myself and others about the impact of meeting a woman’s Beta Need aspect of Hypergamy being served by the state and/or direct or indirect transfers of resources from men to women. Most of my readers are well aware of how this side of Hypergamy has been progressively accommodated for over the past fifty years. In spite of this it’s important to remember that this accommodation of provisioning needs doesn’t eliminate the deeper needs that this side of Hypergamy engenders in women. It may be true that women have never been better provided for in history as far as money and opportunities go, but women still look for emotional security, protection, dominance and comfort in men as part of their innate mental firmware.

As a result of Hypergamy and this concealed estrus state women have been put into a condition of evaluating sex in different aspects today.

Validational Sex

When women look for that Alpha Seed in their peak ovulatory (proliferative) phase, the sex they seek is a desired sex with a man who meets evolutionary criteria. He’s the ‘hawt’ guy, or the man who leaves a woman with an perception of danger or excitement. A lot of men who don’t meet this criteria have a tendency to over-exaggerate this type of man as the ‘Alpha Chad’ and make a ridiculous parody of him as an ego protection mechanism for themselves. Let me state for the record here that every aspect and adjective that this type of guy embodies is mitigated by conditions and contexts. It is just as likely that this conventionally masculine dominant guy is only so according to his most immediate social situation. So spare me the “Chad Thundercock” anxieties.

The sex that women give “enthusiastic consent” for is validational for them. The easy assessment here is that women have a genuine desire to mate with conventionally masculine men who look and act the part – yes, behavioral congruency is vital. If you follow the research women consciously and unconsciously will actively put themselves into environments where the likelihood of their meeting a dominant masculine man who most closely matched that masculine ideal when they are in estrus. They openly and discreetly look of arousal cue from men who best embody what can only be described as Alpha Seed.

I should also add that women in “satisfying relationships” (meaning LTRs where a woman is still very hot for her husband/boyfriend) report an increase in sexual desire (proceptivity) for that guy during this phase. A lot of guys mistakenly think ANY woman will want to seek out extra-pair mating (cheating) opportunities when they’re in estrus. This is only true if a woman isn’t into her current man.

I don’t want to get too lost in the descriptions here. Rather, I want to focus on the associative feelings women get in and after having sex with that Alpha man during estrus. I would argue that Alpha Widows are made in the estrus phase. This is the sex women want to have and are enthusiastic in both the hunt and the act itself. This is largely (presumedly) the sex that men have with their wives-to-be before they marry. It’s this validational sex, the sex that women fantasize about, that men and women want to get back to once they are committed to each other monogamously but now have a dead bedroom. This sex validates a woman’s ego in that it proves to herself that a man of this SMV caliber would want to pin her to the bed and have marathon sex with her. Remember, the latent purpose of this sex, on this side of Hypergamy, is to access the sperm from men with high reproductive value as defined by what our evolved nature predisposes women to be aroused by. Validational sex is sex by choice and genuine desire, and is satisfying on both a psychological level and an evolutionary level.

Transactional Sex

One of the benefits of a concealed estrus is that it allows women a few luxuries. One of these was the ability to confuse men of their paternity. Today this confusion is little more difficult because we’ve got DNA figured out well enough to make accurate assessments, but in our evolutionary past it was important to trick cuckolded fathers into second guessing whether a child was his or not before he killed it and impregnated a woman on his own (this is also why men evolved mate guarding behaviors).

The other advantage of concealed estrus was essentially prostitution. Now, to pretty this up a bit, lets say that women who were sexual with men outside of their fertility window found that sex could be leveraged with non-Alpha men (men they didn’t want to have children with) to encourage them to help with a lot of the chores more Alpha men were less willing (but not entirely unwilling) to do. Enter transactional sex.

As mentioned, the most overt form of transactional sex is prostitution, but it’s impolite to call every woman a whore. In fact it’s impolite to even imply a woman may be having sex for other reasons than validational sex. Today women are contemplating whether or not transactional sex is itself rape since it technically meets the definition of rape (sex women don’t want to have). I discussed this “grey area sex” recently in another essay, but it’s interesting to see women wrestle with transactional sex in an era where the Future is Female and women ought to only have the (validational) sex they want to enthusiastically have.

For most men (i.e the 80% Beta men) transactional sex is where the rubber meets the road. In fact, I’d argue that for most Beta men transactional sex is the only definition of sex they ever really know. That’s kind of sad to think about, but most men never really experience the unfettered feral lust of a woman they’ve chosen to spend the rest of their lives with. I got into this in Saving the Best and Hats Off to the Bull, but I think it’s important for the average man today to acknowledge that it’s highly likely that their wives have shared parts of themselves with, and have lost all inhibitions with, men in their sexual pasts they may never know anything about. That’s a cold bucket of reality a lot of men who unplug from all this have to confront.

Marriage today is almost entirely predicated on on the transactional sex side of Hypergamy. I’m not saying it has to be, nor am I saying it always is, but I’m fairly comfortable in speculating that for most married women sex is reward she uses in the operant conditioning of her husband. And the very fact that this is effective with most husbands throws the power dynamic and Frame of the relationship firmly over to the wife. This has the effect of disqualifying that man from ever (or very rarely) being a candidate for validational sex within that marriage. And this too is another aspect of the transactional sex dynamic that modern feminists are contemplating today – if a woman doesn’t want to have sex with her husband, but does anyway, is it rape? But again, NAMALT, not all marriages are like this or have to be like this. I would also argue that a confident man whom a woman admires, who she recognizes as being above her SMV even if slightly and who has internalized Red Pill awareness within that marriage needn’t be doomed to transactional “duty” sex in his marriage.

Unnegotiated Desire

And so now we come full circle to the men I was counseling back in the day. Because all they’d ever known was transactional sex their deductive male brains attempted to solve their “sex problem” in the most logistical and pragmatic way – negotiate with her. If all sex ever is for a guy is a transaction – a quid pro quo – then it follows he’ll try to find the best way to ‘pay’ for his wife’s sexual access. Hunter Drew and I were recently discussing a man who Dean Abbot has been counseling and one thing we’ve all seen a lot of from young and old Blue Pill Beta men is this logical tendency for them to want to ‘sacrifice their way to happiness with their wives’. It’s as if the more they sacrifice the more they pay for that intimacy they seek, but what they never get is that this only buries their sex lives that much more.

One amazing turn around a lot of married and single Red Pill guys experience when they unplug is the attention they receive from women when they switch from a transactional disposition to a validational disposition with regard to sex. When a man unplugs and cuts himself away from his Blue Pill conditioning one change he makes is a shift from viewing sex as transactional to validational. In the beginning, when men are first learning Game and becoming more Red Pill aware about the nature of women they really don’t recognize this shift in attitude towards sex. When I say men need to make themselves the “prize” with regards to sex and their attention what happens is they go from the “how can I pay for sex to qualify for it with a woman” to “women will recognize that I represent and opportunity for validational sex”.

The Blue Pill conditions men to base their understanding of sex on a transactional paradigm. It’s all scarcity, and luck or providence that a woman might want to fuck them. This is why women get aggravated by the presumption that men might feel they are ‘owed sex‘ in exchange for what they do for them. And why wouldn’t men feel that way? They’ve been conditioned for half a life to believe that they should follow the old social contract and become a man with a lot to offer a woman, a wife. This is the transactional paradigm; I build my life to better accommodate a woman and she reciprocates with sex. Women know this too, so all pretenses of indignation about are complete bullshit. What upsets women is that a Beta man would feel entitled to her sexuality for having accommodated her. Alpha men are entitled to it, accommodations be damned, because he’s the man they want to have sex with.

When I was compiling the material I was going to use for my second book, Preventive Medicine, I chose to use the essay Vulnerability in the hopes that I might be able to dispel one of the more egregious fantasies about masculinity – that vulnerability is in some way a strength for men. At the time I was rebutting the Mark Manson claim that men’s vulnerability was a necessity in whatever it was he used to consider Game, or the idea that a lot of Purple Pill hacks like to cling to about men’s vulnerability being some foundation upon which a “healthy” relationship ought to be built on. This trope is pulled straight from the Oprah / Dr. Phill handbook and really the belief that a man’s vulnerability is in someway a strength is part of a Blue Pill conditioned belief set that young boys are taught from a very early age.

Go to any woman’s dating advice for men blog today and you’ll likely read some variation of it. It’s actually part of our pop-psychology social consciousness – transvaluation is a very common theme; reversing weakness with strength has been the order for feminizing men and masculinizing women since the Sexual Revolution. I can remember hearing this ‘advice’ since the late 80s on any number of daytime talk shows. Reading this pabulum coming from ‘dating coaches’ with any association to the Red Pill was enough for me to want to dispel the notion. That, and the need for men to get in touch with their Jungian feminine sides as a means to better identifying with women and thus eventually getting laid by all the women who supposedly swooned for vulnerable, sensitive and emotionally available men (also known as ‘Beta Orbiters’).

However, as I was editing that essay for inclusion in the book I realized that what I was considering wasn’t so much the transvaluation of vulnerability and strength, but the model upon which the Feminine Imperative would like to convince men is appropriate and best suited for women’s needs in a relationship. The provable fact that women’s Hypergamy predisposes them to being aroused by men who display the most opposite aspects to this vulnerability (Dark Triad traits for example) doesn’t seem to matter; vulnerability is only beneficial to women seeking comfort and security in a long term partner.

In that essay I outlined a few things about what masculinity has become in a post-Sexual Revolution female-primary social order:

For the greater part of men’s upbringing and socialization they are taught that a conventional masculine identity is in fact a fundamentally male weakness that only women have a unique ‘cure’ for. It’s a widely accepted manosphere fact that over the past 60 or so years, conventional masculinity has become a point of ridicule, an anachronism, and every media form from then to now has made a concerted effort to parody and disqualify that masculinity. Men are portrayed as buffoons for attempting to accomplish female-specific roles, but also as “ridiculous men” for playing the conventional ‘macho’ role of masculinity. In both instances, the problems their inadequate maleness creates are only solved by the application of uniquely female talents and intuition.

Perhaps more damaging though is the effort the Feminine Imperative has made in convincing generations of men that masculinity and its expressions (of any kind) is an act, a front, not the real man behind the mask of masculinity that’s already been predetermined by his feminine-primary upbringing.

Women who lack any living experience of the male condition have the calculated temerity to define for men what they should consider manhood – from a feminine-primary context. This is why men’s preconception of vulnerability being a sign of strength is fundamentally flawed. Their concept of vulnerability stems from a feminine pretext.

Masculinity and vulnerability are defined by a female-correct concept of what should best serve the Feminine Imperative. That feminine defined masculinity (tough-guy ridiculousness) feeds the need for defining vulnerability as a strength – roll over, show your belly and capitulate to that feminine definition of masculinity – and the cycle perpetuates itself.

I returned to this essay today because I think that over the past six months we’re seeing a strengthening push from the Feminine Imperative to clamp down on what we’re to believe should be an acceptable expression of masculinity. In essence the imperative (or the Village if you like) has been using every mass shooting tragedy to reiterate what masculinity should mean to men. And, failing this, the hope is still that men will be confused as to what conventional expressions they can subjectively define it in, in a more female-correct way.

The Feminine-Correct Paradigm

Since the most recent school shooting in Florida, the focus on what constitutes masculinity has come to the forefront of our social consciousness. What exactly is masculinity they keep asking, and then provide definitions that only have meaning to a social order that’s founded on female social dominance. They are definitions that most men heard repeated constantly as boys from their overwhelmingly female-taught and feminine-primary educations. Since the beginning of the Sexual Revolution and the rise of Fempowerment boys and men are expected to grow up into a female-defined masculinity. Boys are acculturated in contexts that feminize them, yet we are meant to believe that all the horrors of Patriarchal masculinity are still being taught to them today:

Two decades ago, the psychologist William Pollack wrote that boys start out sensitive but through a “shame-hardening process” — told to stop crying, to be a man — they learn to hide what they really feel. And if they don’t know or understand their own feelings, how can they care about anyone else’s?

This has become something of a cliché. And the truth is, there’s no single culture of boys, but many. In my memories of adolescence, beneath the constant ribbing and occasional pyromania, we had tremendous affection for one another. And we longed to connect with women with an intensity that was difficult to contemplate.

This was a quote from Real Men Get Rejected Too. It’s a good illustration of the paradox masculinity presents to parents and educators. The idea that boys are these sensitive delicate souls who, through the evils of their Patriarchal (typically male) upbringing, are conditioned to become ‘macho’ violent men is a popular trope. After Nikolas Cruz killed 17 kids at school it was the go-to rationale. “Boys are brought up to be violent gun-loving beasts thanks to a perpetuated misogynistic culture of men” or some variation of this is common. It’s an easy, digestible, info-bite that sounds right because we’ve heard it for so long. If only boys we’re taught more like girls to get in touch with their emotions and were vulnerable in expressing them we could avoid these male-created tragedies.

That’s the pretense we’re supposed to believe – and it’s important that a larger society does believe in the inherent evilness of masculinity if the Feminine Imperative is to maintain social dominance. But the truth is boys have been systematically feminized for the past 3-4 generations. Boys are taught like defective girls. Since the 1970s it is increasingly women who have dominated academia from kindergarten to doctorate degrees. The entire western education system is founded on a feminine-primary, feminine-defined teaching methodology. In the process of advantaging girls to the utmost efficiency in school (to fempower adult women) the educational atmosphere had to be defined by what best served girls. School and teaching became ‘for girls’ and the educational landscape shifted to teaching styles that girls were most benefited in.

In that shift the idea that boys might be disadvantaged had little bearing, but overtime the conditions of teaching ‘to girls’ defined the teaching style as the correct style. In fact, teaching in a way that girls learn best, and disciplining boys for not learning this way, is no longer a style – it is just the way children are taught. Boys and men today are the product of female teachers who actively advantage girls at the expense of boys. So normalized is this teaching that boys disrupting the advantaging of girls in class is something we’ve decided needs to be medicinally curbed. Boys being boys is diagnosed as an illness and drugs are prescribed so as to sedate them long enough for the girls to learn.

This focus on empowering girls isn’t limited to the classroom. In every form of early childhood through adolescent media, music, social networks and social exchanges this theme is continued; girls have the future in their reach, boys are potential rapists and criminals if they don’t fall in line with female-correct way of how things just are. I get asked a lot about what I think defines Blue Pill conditioning and I’d say this ambient social theme of fempowerment is a strong basis for it. Boys are not taught this old-school, much-feared Patriarchal masculinity, they are bombarded with themes of how masculinity is incorrect, laughable, and a shameful ‘act’ that boys have to put on to cover the ‘real’ female-correct versions of their sensitive selves. Boys are taught from the earliest age that being a boy is an incorrect mask, while being a girl, learning like a girl, emoting and relating like a girl is ‘real’ and the correct way of developing a personality.

Boys are systematically taught to make women and womankind their Mental Point of Origin. This is why it is so difficult for men to unplug and abandon their old Blue Pill selves; feminine-primacy was literally conditioned into them since they were kids.

Nikolas Cruz, like many other teenage shooters is the product of this feminine-primary education system, not a Patriarchal “teach boys not to cry” machismo school. He is a monster of their creation; one taught to cry on demand and emote like a girl. He’s the result of a participation trophy mentality that demonize men and masculinity to the point that he never learns how to bounce back from defeat, rejection or simply life’s adversities. No men and no masculinity is available to teach that kid how to harden up and be resilient, or how that masculine discipline is not bullying or hazing, but a necessary part of a boy’s maturation into a masculine man.

But to throw society off the trail a false narrative of hyper-masculinity ruining our otherwise feminine-correct boys is perpetuated. When the next school shooting takes place the Village will again want the public to believe it’s masculinity and men’s fault for what is really his emotional outburst. The Village will attempt to place the responsibility on men, on fathers, while in the meantime perpetuating the idea that men/fathers are superfluous at best, a societal burden at worst. Men are useful catspaws in so many ways, and in perpetuating this narrative the Village reinforces the female-correct theme for grown men too.

One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.

For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.

Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.

It’s important to review this premise if we want to understand the real intent the Feminine Imperative has in redefining masculinity for men. Aspects of conventional masculinity are useful for women, and masculine duty (appeals to men’s “honor”) is a means to access it while avoiding the aspects that would in any way advantage men over women. Conventional masculinity is largely disparaged and parodied in order to disenfranchise men, but men are still needed to save women from natural disasters and protect them from physical harm (so long as they never expect sex for it). On some level of consciousness women understand the transactional and validational aspects of sex. They know that men’s serviceableness comes with an implied transactional cost, so to circumvent this women had to be put in charge of defining what masculinity should mean to men.

Masculinity as defined by men is almost always illegitimate and inauthentic in a feminine-primary world order. The presumption is that “macho man” ridiculous masculinity is a mask that men wear. That mask is meant to cover their true feminine-correct selves; because men cannot be authentic in any other context than the taught, feminine-correct context. So, of course, men can only be fakes or insecure of their masculinity (the masculinity defined by the feminine) and can never ‘really’ be that strong, dominant male apart from the permission the Feminine Imperative gives him.

Because the Feminine Imperative controls the overall context for what should be correct for men this has the effect of making women the sole deciders of what is masculine. In effect, and in this Blue Pill context, women become the gatekeepers of manhood. If masculinity imbues men with manhood (literally being considered a man) a ‘man’ is only whom a woman will designate as such within her presumed, feminine-correct context. In other words, do the imperative’s bidding and it dubs you a ‘man’.

Breaking the Cycle

As you might’ve guessed, this social dynamic conflicts with women’s Hypergamous imperatives. A Beta who thinks he’s a ‘man’ and presumes entitlements because of that is a woman’s worst fear. A Beta transgressing into a manhood that the imperative didn’t give him is the making for a guy being considered a sexual predator. However, an Alpha man, a man of high sexual market value still needs to accept the feminine-correct social frame, but he must also know his role within that frame. I’ve made the comparison in the past that women only see men as either draft animals or breeding stock. In a feminine-correct paradigm the breeding stock must know that his conventionally masculine aspects mean different things to a woman (Alpha Fucks sex) than the draft animal’s masculine aspects (Beta Bucks service). As such, masculinity and a designation of being a man becomes a constant qualifier for a Beta male. Manhood becomes a carrot he follows to pull the feminine-correct cart.

In fact, Beta men hold their female-correct ‘man’ designation as an unwitting point of pride. Examples abound of self-righteous Betas AMOGing other men for not being ‘real men’ (according to the imperative) like themselves. What they’re ignorant of is that this self-righteousness is defined by how well they conform to the masculinity that the imperative tells him is useful – and avoiding the ‘toxic’ masculinity it also defines for him – all according to his role in the scheme of a woman’s sexual strategy.

Should a man awaken from this Blue Pill conditioning and coronate himself as a ‘man’ outside the approval of womankind, this is when he’s ridiculed as an old school Patriarch and an anachronism of the old male-incorrect social paradigm. This is the control the imperative has against men stepping out side this female-controlled masculinity. The first response any female critic has for men who make themselves their mental point of origin is to remove that status of manhood.

Because they don’t accept feminine-primacy this disqualifies them from ‘real’ manhood.

One of the most difficult aspects men face in unplugging and living in Red Pill awareness is the social stigma that follows when they remove womankind from the pedestal and make themselves their mental point of origin. He gets called an asshole, he gets called selfish, he gets called a misogynist, but he’s also “less of a man” because he no longer conforms to the definition of masculinity that the Feminine Imperative has taught him from his earliest memories. Learning to redefine his mental image of what makes a man a man in his own Red Pill aware state is tough. Most of what he considered the very limited and controlled aspects of an ideal masculinity are a big part of the Blue Pill idealism he was raised on. This transition to conventional masculinity is also hampered by a deep learning of shame and gender loathing for finding anything positive in masculinity.

These are some important things to keep in mind if you are moving into a Red Pill awareness and learning to live in a new paradigm based around a conventional understanding of masculinity that isn’t inherently evil. It’s hard to do, but that old mental model of masculinity your teachers (all of them) convinced you was incorrect is something you must unlearn and cut yourself away from. Know that women don’t just long for that dominant masculinity, they needit for the health of their own life experiences. They need the protection, the comfort, the security and the discipline that masculinity balances their lives with.

Women ask, “where have all the ‘real’ men gone?”, but they exist outside the presumed, feminine-correct paradigm they mistakenly believe they have a secure control of. They don’t want to let go of that, so they will fight you to maintain a control over masculinity (which by definition can be chaotic as well as comforting) that they never really had – even with all the social engineering.

On Saturday I had a great discussion with Anthony Johnson, Rian Stone (Married Red Pill Reddit) and “Carl” from Black Label Logic. The topic was a critique of the impact Dr. Jordan Peterson is having on a society of ‘lost’ (mostly) young men and how his message is affecting this generally rudderless generation of men. It’s a little over two hours long, but from the overwhelming response on YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other forums it’s definitely struck a nerve. As an aside here, I’m considering making this meet up video format something I may do semi-regularly (like every other week) with some of the men I consider peers in the manosphere.

You can watch this talk at your leisure, but it has taught me a few things. As I mentioned in the chat it’s next to impossible to have any disagreement or critique of people whom other’s believe are your betters. As Rollo Tomassi it’s impossible for me to be critical of any high profile guy in the sphere without the accusations of professional jealousy or sour grapes being the first reflexive response from haters. I got that, but I’ve learned the conversation is more important that trying to convince anyone of it being genuine. In fact, I think it belies a bigger problem when they are above critique.

That aside, I think it was good to finally parse where Red Pill awareness and what Peterson is advocating have some overlap and where we differ. Peterson is a fountain of hope for the ‘lost’ boys, so anything critical of his message is going to sound like it’s endorsing an “enjoy the decline” mentality. I can’t expect everyone to have read up on my own opinion about that, but the short version is that I’ve never been convinced of some inevitable decline and fall of western civilization. In other words, I think it is possible to turn the ship around; where I may differ is in how that might be done.

For the record here I want to say that I have a great respect for Dr. Peterson. I think he’s what the sphere has needed for a while and I think he fits the role of ‘champion’ that a generation of young men have wanted to place on someone. Ideologically I agree with about 85-90% of what he advocates and there’s no doubt that he’s got definite skin in the game. In fact I really hate it when people use that as some catch phrase to disqualify men today. As a man we all have skin in the game now. How much and to what degree may be debatable, but we all live in a feminine-primary social order and as such we all have a lot to risk whether we acknowledge this or not.

Where I differ with Peterson is in his very Trad-Con solutions to turning the ship around. I wasn’t shocked to see him endorsed in videos for Prager University. In some ways what he proposes resonates with young men looking for a direction because their fathers and generations of Blue Pill men haven’t been able to deliver a way out of Hell for them. I go into this in more detail in our talk here, but here are some of my issues with Peterson’s take on things:

• Life is suffering and sacrifice: In every video I’ve watched Dr. Peterson’s founding (zen-like) premise is that life is suffering and the best men can do is to find ways to minimize that suffering. Men (and I’ve yet to see a video addressing women) must sacrifice parts or all of themselves in order to qualify for “genuine” manhood. The degree of that self-sacrifice is relative to how high a status that man can achieve.

• Blue Pill conditioning seems to define his perspective of women: Essentially the archetype he has for women was formed for him as a 7 year old boy when he first developed a soul-mate ONEitis for his wife. His reluctance to acknowledge the Alpha Fucks side of women’s Hypergamy in any video (beyond his repeated use of 50 Shades of Grey as a humorous example) leads me to the impression that he defaults to women as innately ‘good’ and above too much criticism. As such he focuses almost entirely on the good provider / parental investment / Beta need side of Hypergamy. This is unsurprising as it follows the same Trad-Con interpretations of women being “closer to God than men” and men must qualify themselves, and sacrifice themselves for women’s (wives) intimate approval. Dalrock has covered this dynamic among male “complementarian” Christian leaders quite extensively.

• Sacrifice of men is a parallel to men’s disposability: Men will blow themselves up for pussy. From what I gather from his talks Peterson endorses male disposability as a form of Honor. He seems to play on the ‘Man Up / Shut Up’ dynamic I talked about in The Honor System. What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny. I’m not suggesting Peterson is accusing men of Patriarchy or Misogyny, rather, like most Trad-Cons, it’s a question of living up to one’s duty as a man in his disposability and his usefulness in that sacrifice.

• “Get your shit together” is also a plea for sacrifice: If a man is less valuable his sacrifice is less meaningful. No one cares about mediocre / average men’s sacrifices, but if a man accepts that he is to improve himself it is so that his sacrifice is more appreciated and important. Thus, the comparisons to Christ’s sacrifice as being the ultimate expression of sacrifice and meaning which Peterson uses in his dissertations on manhood and the Bible. My issue here is that women and a feminine-primary social order lack a capacity to appreciate the sacrifices men make because these are taken-for-granted expectations of what a man just “ought to do”.

• Peterson is egalitarian to a fault: The mantra may be for men to sack up and make something of themselves, but this is couched in an egalitarian equalism that’s prevalent today. If I had one question to ask Jordan it would be this; is there a dominance hierarchy in a healthy LTR or marriage? I don’t know for certain. My guess is he would say it passes back and forth between a husband and wife which is to say he falls back on an egalitarian ideal. However, outside the family structure he acknowledges that men and women in a state of egalitarianism choose to adopt traditional gender roles (I think he gave the same example as was covered here).

• Dr. Peterson regularly resorts to shaming language with men, rarely does he do the same with women: This may be a simple question of his delivery, but Peterson is always harder on men than he is with women. In so doing he adopts the AMOGing of only men techniques that a pastor like Mark Driscoll uses from the pulpit. Inso doing he pedestalizes women and absolves them of any consequences of their Hypergamous choices by imploring men to “man up and marry those sluts“. In essence the sacrificial nature of men becomes one that is necessary for the continuance of ‘family’ and western culture in spite of women. I also see how this plays into the idea of women lacking any moral agency, personal responsibility and wiping the bad behavior of women off on the men who have allowed this to happen. Once again it comes back to the hypoagency of women.

• Peterson believes that desire can be negotiated: This is my biggest problem with Peterson’s approach to women. This undoubtedly comes from his being a clinical psychologist, but like most therapists he defaults to the idea that genuine desire can be motivated by a process of negotiation. If there is one example of his lack of experience with women it is this belief. In several of his interviews and podcasts he makes reference to appealing to women’s reason and negotiating terms for acceptable behavior (always a man’s behavior) in exchange for intimacy and/or a stress-free marriage. This is the egalitarian, Oprah Approved, male-sublimated means to achieving transactional intimacy.

As you might guess, I strongly disagree with negotiating intimacy. You cannot negotiate genuine desire. You can obligate a woman to fuck you (now called rape) via negotiation, but you cannot organically inspire genuine desire in a woman. This has always been my main point of contention with the marriage counseling trade for a long time.

What is the Red Pill version of “man-up”?

I had a commenter ask me this in the last comment thread. I think there’s two sides to this question. First, I think there’s a need to keep the Red Pill (in the intersexual sense) as close to an objectivist purpose as possible. That means Red Pill awareness is the result of a continuing praxeology.

I’ve locked horns with a few Red Pill guys recently who seem to think that ‘Red Pill’ is an ideology and it’s just the counter revolt to feminism; basically it is feminism for men. I think that does a huge disservice to everything and everyone that’s brought us to where we are today in Red Pill awareness and all of the work and personal risk that was put on the line to explore what we know as Red Pill awareness now. Not only that it casually devalues the effort and work that’s continuing right now.

Critics and feminists alike want to draw parallels in the manosphere to whatever (fictitious) wave of feminism they think applies to whatever the Men’s Rights Movement is calling Red Pill at the moment. Believing that Red Pill is an ideology is one more casualty of how the term / brand has been bastardized by other ideologies who’ve never had any business referring to themselves as “red pill”.

Presuming Red Pill is just an ideology is juvenile, and unsurprisingly it’s an opinion of some underexperienced men in the manosphere who want for simplistic answers. They don’t want to think about what Red Pill awareness implies on a larger social scale. They want a flag to wave and an easy to understand ideology so they can stick it to their feminist enemies. I get it. They want Red Pill (however they define it) to be that ideology, but to me, I think, and I’ve always said it, the Red Pill needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, areligious and amoral to ensure that it stays true to understanding truth. It needs to remain true to being an aggregate of men’s collected experiences with intersexual dynamics.

What these guys want is a meaning to that truth, but that’s not the Red Pill. Meaning is what men will apply to that truth according to their individual needs, situations and circumstances. This is why Peterson and probably some more personalities to follow him will be popular in the future; they prioritize meaning above truth. If you listen to the first podcast of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson they spend the entire time trying to come to an agreed measure of truth between the two of them so they can move on (in the second podcast) to what is meaning.

You want to know why I don’t do prescriptions on The Rational Male? Because we disempower ourselves when we follow someone else’s path and not our own.

There is a deep need in almost all people to improve or ‘fix’ ourselves in some way. I’ve written essays about it; discontent is is the human condition. That in no way means that life is suffering as per the Peterson (Zen) doctrine, but it is man’s condition to never be satisfied with even the greatest of accomplishments. That is what put us at the top of the species contest on this planet. You can be constructively or destructively discontent, but when you tell me that life is suffering and the only way to lessen that suffering (never to solve it of course) is to sacrifice my way to a better life all that says to me is that you’re out of ideas for a creative solution and you’re all-in on the destructive methods. Either that or you’ll continue naval gazing.

Fuck that.

So, the Red Pill needs to remain a praxeology and it ought to always resist being force-fit into an ideology because it’s always some ideological hack who wants to claim the truth it reveals as proof of his own purpose. The Red Pill has to remain an open source aggregate of men’s experiences. That’s why we’re still here today in spite of the Rooshs who said it would die out 3 years ago – it’s open source and decentralized information.

Now, to the second point, what does ‘Man up’ mean in the Red Pill context? I think this is really for the individual to decide, but I’d say that it would involve a man utilizing and internalizing the awareness the Red Pill represents to him and improving his life with it. In the Safety Net post’s comment thread there are hundreds of examples of how men saved their own lives, often literally. How the Red Pill truth reached them and then manifested in their lives is highly individual. I mentioned the need for a dissociation with ideology because that usually means aligning oneself with the expectations of someone else’s version of truth, not the objective (or as objective as we can make it) truth of the Red Pill.

When I hear ‘man-up’, I identify the context only as derogatory… is there any other definition which is not?

It should, because in almost all contexts imploring a guy to “Man Up” is following someone else’s path, not your own. This is what I mean when I say that I’m not in the business of creating better men, I’m in the business of men making themselves better men. And in today’s world of men seeking direction there is no shortage of personalities who’d like nothing more than to profit from selling men on their paths.

If there is a definition of ‘manning up’ in a Red Pill sense it is living a better way than your previous life that was informed by the falsehoods of your Blue Pill conditioning. Manning up Red Pill is killing off that old Blue Pill-created persona and killing off the false idealisms it taught you. It’s understanding and internalizing that those lies made you a less authentic person because the Blue Pill is firmly an ideology, but one that wears the mask of freedom or choice or individualism. If self-improvement in a Red Pill sense entail some basic tenets, one is that a man cuts himself away from that old Blue Pill paradigm and rebuilds a better life for himself based on a real understanding of intersexual truth on the personal, social and political scales.

Manning up Red Pill begins with rejecting the lies of egalitarian equalism and a commitment to real objective understanding of intersexual dynamics.